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From its inception, Jewish-American literature has taken as its subject as well as its context the idea of Jewishness itself. Jewish culture is a diasporic one, and for this reason the concept of Jewishness differs from country to country and across time. What stays remarkably similar, though, is Jewish self-perception and relatedly Jewish literary style. This is as true for the first-generation immigrant writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anzia Yezierska who came to the United States from abroad as it is for their second-generation children born in the United States, and the children of those children. In this course, we will consider the difficulties of displacement for the emigrant generation and their efforts to sustain their cultural integrity in the multicultural American environment. We'll also examine the often comic revolt of their American-born children and grandchildren against their (grand-)parents nostalgia and failure to assimilate. Only by considering these transnati
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From its inception, Jewish-American literature has taken as its subject as well as its context the idea of Jewishness itself. Jewish culture is a diasporic one, and for this reason the concept of Jewishness differs from country to country and across time. What stays remarkably similar, though, is Jewish self-perception and relatedly Jewish literary style. This is as true for the first-generation immigrant writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anzia Yezierska who came to the United States from abroad as it is for their second-generation children born in the United States, and the children of those children. In this course, we will consider the difficulties of displacement for the emigrant generation and their efforts to sustain their cultural integrity in the multicultural American environment. We'll also examine the often comic revolt of their American-born children and grandchildren against their (grand-)parents nostalgia and failure to assimilate. Only by considering these transnational roots can one understand the particularity of the Jewish-American novel in relation to mainstream and minority American literatures. In investigating the link between American Jewish writers and their literary progenitors, we will draw largely but not exclusively from Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe.

This course examines social conflicts and political controversies in American culture through the lens of visual art and photography. We consider how visual images both reflect and participate in the social and political life of the nation and how the terms of citizenship have been represented¿and, at times, contested¿by artists throughout the first half of the 20th century. The class explores the relation between American art and the body politic by focusing on issues of poverty, war, censorship, consumerism, class identity, and racial division.

AMSTUD 147J:Studies in Music, Media, and Popular Culture: The Soul Tradition in African American Music (AFRICAAM 19, CSRE 147J, MUSIC 147J, MUSIC 247J)

The African American tradition of soul music from its origins in blues, gospel, and jazz to its influence on today's r&b, hip hop, and dance music. Style such as rhythm and blues, Motown, Southern soul, funk, Philadelphia soul, disco, Chicago house, Detroit techno, trip hop, and neo-soul. Soul's cultural influence and global reach; its interaction with politics, gender, place, technology, and the economy. Pre-/corequisite (for music majors):
MUSIC 22. (WIM at 4 units only.)

AMSTUD 150:Introduction to English II: American Literature and Culture to 1855 (ENGLISH 11B)

(Formerly
English 23/123). A survey of early American writings, including sermons, poetry, captivity and slave narratives, essays, autobiography, and fiction, from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War.

AMSTUD 151F:Angelheaded Hipsters: Beat Writers of San Francisco and New York (ENGLISH 151F)

Reading of central writers of the Beat movement (Ginsberg, Kerouac, di Prima, Snyder, Whalen) as well as some related writers (Creeley, Gunn, Levertov). Issues explored include NY and SF, Buddhism and leftist politics, poetry and jazz. Some exposure to reading poems to jazz accompaniment. Examination of some of the writers and performers growing out of the Beats: Bob Dylan, rock music, especially from San Francisco, and jazz.

Last offered: Winter 2019
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-CE

AMSTUD 152A:"Mutually Assured Destruction": American Culture and the Cold War

The temperature of the early Cold War years via readings of Soviet and U.S. propaganda; documentary film and film noir; fiction by Bellow, Ellison, O¿Connor, and Mailer; social theory by Arendt, the New York Intellectuals, and the Frankfurt School; and political texts such as Kennan¿s
Sources of Soviet Conduct, the ¿Truman Doctrine¿ speech, and the National Security Council Report 68. Major themes include the discourse of totalitarianism, MacCarthyism, strategies of containment, the nuclear threat, the figure of the ¿outsider¿ and the counterculture, and the cultural shift from sociological to psychological idioms.

Last offered: Winter 2013
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

AMSTUD 152C:The JFK Era and American Literature

Few U.S. presidents have exerted so great a fascination on the national¿and global¿post-World War II imagination as John F. Kennedy. As the 2013¿s semi-centennial anniversary of Kennedy¿s assassination attests, the production of films, television and multimedia programs, biographies, conspiracy theories, academic studies, and literary texts about the iconic JFK and his fabled, thousand-day presidency continues unabated. In this course, we will explore the attention Kennedy has drawn from writers and filmmakers in texts by Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others.

Today, almost one-third of Americans identify with a racial/ethnic minority group, and more than 9 million Americans identify with multiple races. What are the implications of such diversity for American politics and culture? This course approaches issues of race from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing research in the social sciences and humanities to assess how race shapes perceptions of identity as well as political behavior in 21st-century U.S. Issues surrounding the role of multiculturalism, immigration, acculturation, racial representation, and racial prejudice in American society. Topics include the political and social formation of race; racial representation in the media, arts, and popular culture; the rise and decline of the "one-drop rule" and its effect on political and cultural attachments; the politicization of census categories and the rise of the multiracial movement.

Last offered: Winter 2018
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-ED

AMSTUD 154:American Intellectual and Cultural History to the Civil War (HISTORY 154)

(Same as
HISTORY 54. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for 154.) How Americans considered problems such as slavery, imperialism, and sectionalism. Topics include: the political legacies of revolution; biological ideas of race; the Second Great Awakening; science before Darwin; reform movements and utopianism; the rise of abolitionism and proslavery thought; phrenology and theories of human sexuality; and varieties of feminism. Sources include texts and images.

AMSTUD 160:Perspectives on American Identity (ENGLISH 165)

Required for American Studies majors. In this seminar we trace diverse and changing interpretations of American identity by exploring autobiographical, literary, and/or visual texts from the 18th through the 20th century in conversation with sociological, political, and historical accounts. *Fulfills Writing In the Major Requirement for American Studies Majors*